SOURCE: “Pattern—and the ‘Simulacral,’” in Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach, University of Alabama Press, 1998, pp. 130-39.

In the following excerpt, Scalapino discusses elements of multiplicity and atemporality in Bernstein's verse in The Sophist.

The way things are seen in a time is that period of time and is the composition of that time. The way things are seen is unique in any moment, as a new formation of events, objects, and cultural abstraction.

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost any one can be certain. The time when and...